Many people are curious as to what "speed painting" is, how I did it and why I did it. So I decided I would write a (rather lengthy) blog post to answer your questions.
One of my judges at the pageant asked me what speed painting is. I started to explain how I got into it and the process of practicing for it when she stopped me and said, "No, I mean what is it? Like, what are you doing?"
I realize that maybe the term, "speed painting," is not a clear definition of the talent that I performed on Thursday and Saturday of the Miss Kansas pageant week. Google's definition is as follows:
Speed painting: n. an artistic technique where the artist has a limited time to finish the work. The time can vary, usually a duration is set from several minutes to a few hours.
More specific to my situation, my speed painting duration was a mere 90 seconds onstage in front of at least 2,000 people in a live audience as well as a webcast audience. I painted on an easel that was custom designed and engineered by my father to be able to spin the canvas as well as be taken apart and transported by my 2002 Honda Civic.
So let's start from the beginning. Where did this idea even come from?
My senior year of high school, the men who ran the theater came to me with an idea: "What if you painted live onstage with the jazz band? Speed painting, essentially."
What if? I decided to go for it. I didn't practice at all (even though I was provided with the music was supposed to at least test it out and see if it was possible), I had all my paints set up, three canvases ready to go, and a "wing it" attitude. A camera was set up peering under my arm so that my work could be projected on screens above the stage, and I began painting. Two of the works were successfully completed in one song each. The third is what really fueled the continuation of this kind of performance for me.
The third painting was completed in two songs and was painted upside-down. It was a man playing the piano and when I turned it right-side-up, the audience gasped and murmured - they were in awe. The satisfaction and thrill that that gave me sat in the back of my mind for two years.
Now, I am studying art education at the University of Kansas. I have always yearned for a way to express my visual talents onstage in a pageant. I have tried to execute this by designing my wardrobe or one time I tried to show an animation I had created, but it was never truly explicative of what I could do in the field of fine arts.
This past October, I competed for the title of Miss Butler County. I had not thought this through enough to pull it out of my back pocket at the local competition so I sang again, but as soon as I won, I called up my director on the phone and I said, "Larry, you're going to think I'm crazy, but this is what I want to do." And proceeded to explain my idea to bring speed painting to the Miss Kansas stage. He said if I believed I could do it, he would be behind me 100% and Juven followed suit - both have been entirely supportive this whole year.
So how does one go about preparing to speed-paint? I hardly knew where to begin. But to do anything properly, you must begin at the beginning and for me, that was securing an image. I wanted to do something that was recognizable, relatable to the pageant audience, and enticing for me to paint and practice for oh... seven months. I settled on the face of the one and only - Theresa Vail - our current Miss Kansas and national superstar. I asked her if I could use her face as my muse and she was a little surprised that I wanted to paint
her but said absolutely and encouraged me to try this diverse talent.
Now I had the image, what was I supposed to do with it? There was no way I could do a full-color portrait in 90 seconds, though that's entirely what I thought I could do in my mind (I quickly learned otherwise). I literally found the canvas I have been using in a dumpster near campus. Yes, Theresa, I have been painting and repainting your face on a dumpster-canvas :P Hey, it was financially friendly and totally worked!
I sketched her face so much. It's probably creepy how many times I drew her face over and over again. Or just her eyes, or just her nose (noses are stupid). Trying to figure out how I could represent this portrait in paint in 90 seconds. (I am being vulnerable and showing you all the failed times I drew Theresa Vail... some of them are NOT pretty. But for every time it didn't look like her, I had found another way not to draw her face - bringing me closer to ways on how to get it right.)
After sketches, I did a full color portrait, just to see what it would potentially look like...and I knew again that I couldn't do full color... but how I wanted to paint in color... It took so much simplifying.
Side note - A lot of these images I am posting are upside-down because that is how I practiced and painted. My final performance would be creating the image upside-down, not to mention, it helps an artist's brain see the shapes and elements of the face better... I'll explain that in another post, maybe.
Another choice that I continued to mess with, was the scale of the portrait. As I kept simplifying, I decided the recognizable features were in her face and as I cut out all colors except skin tone and black, representing the blonde hair with yellow was also removed. For the record, I entirely wish I had kept the yellow... boo...
The four portraits above were not, I repeat, were NOT painted in 90 seconds. I was just trying to find her likeness and how I wanted the painting to look in the end, then I could break it down. Photoshop was a huge help. I played with the portrait until I had it down to minimal tones that still represented Theresa's features and a composition that I liked. This is when the "speed" part came in.
It was not enough to practice in a sketchbook because this performance was going to take full body movement. Equivalent to singers humming their songs or dancers marking out spacing on the stage and not going full out.
So before I got to the paint part, I did large scale charcoal sketches - trying to get the hang of the lines and spacing... Forgive these sketches... They are wretched. I just couldn't get it to
really look like her, and I was getting progressively discouraged. So I decided I just needed to go for it with the paint. My brother and my boyfriend at the time graciously helped me record and produce a cover of "Brave," by Sara Bareilles and that was the soundtrack to my life for a good chunk of time.
So much of this talent was mental. I would listen to my song on repeat walking down campus, just visualizing the marks I needed to make, mapping out what parts needed to be finished by which part of the song... So even though sketches of Theresa's defining eyebrows continued to fill the sides of my notebooks in class and minimal markings of noses are what I chose to populate my scrap paper, it was time to move forward.
Now, I live in an apartment with three other women and a pitbull, so personal space is limited, especially that to leave out wet paint and a canvas. So if I wasn't able to drive the 15 minutes to campus and haul my things up to the studio, my make-shift studio was my bathroom. THAT was fun ;) You can see I literally had the canvas propped up on a bucket on top of my desk chair! But it worked!
Each time I painted, I felt more and more successful and more and more comfortable. But still not quite there. I conferenced with so many people who are credited with my success - my parents, my best friend/fellow artist/roommate, my mentors from high school who initially sparked the speed painting interest, my artist-grandmother, my college professors, and my brutally honest brother.
I know exactly how much space is between each feature - three spread fingers between the eyebrows, wrist to elbow from the corner of the mouth to the outer right eye, octave stretch from the top of the forehead to the eyebrow. But it wouldn't make sense for me to make those measurements onstage and waste seconds. So I had markings on my canvas to make up for those necessary measurements in order to get it as close to perfect as I could. I was capable of making the portrait without those, but not in the time limit, it just wasn't possible. Moving forward now that I could relatively capture her likeness, was the question of if I should have a third tone to add depth and value. I ended on yes, I should. But do you know when that decision was made? Oh, you know, the Wednesday before I left on Saturday for the competition. I think I practiced maybe 4-6 times total with the half-tone color added in. How's that for giving a person anxiety?
Now let's take it to the next step. The easel. My dad volunteered to engineer and construct me a custom spinning easel (after researching and finding out that "real" spinning easels cost an arm and a leg). Not only did it spin my canvas, it kept it stable during the actual painting AND was able to be taken apart, shipped to Kansas (from Virginia), and put back together fairly easily! Just incredible. So it arrived on my doorstep
Tuesday before I left on
Saturday... giving me four days
tops to assemble the easel, make sure it works, and practice with it before leaving for the actual competition o.O
Oy vey. I put it together and was so excited and what do you know! The canvas hit the base of the easel on the final corner of the spin... cue dramatic music.
After several phone calls with dad, the first option was to saw down the PVC pipes that made up the corner legs of the structure. So I went out and bought a hack saw at Walmart, positioned myself strangely but effectively to saw off PVC pipe on my kitchen table (acquiring strange looks from my roommates and their guests), and cut off an inch of each legs. Problem solved? NOPE. Because there were three other pieces of wood screwed in to the previous height... bullocks. What next?
Well it was either take the height of the base down (tried that) or increase the height of the pole holding the canvas. So I put a book under the pole, raising it an inch or so. Success. But of course, I can't just shove a book under that pole onstage, so another trip to Home Depot was made to secure a metal bit that I can't remember the name of anymore and metal epoxy. It was Wednesday at this point, two more days before I had to take it all apart and leave. While the epoxy dried on the pole, I got some black fabric and velcro and fashioned a "table skirt" of sorts to hide the engineering masterpiece/eyesore as well as a long piece on the front to function as a drop cloth under the paint-zone.
Finally it worked.
And then it was time to take it apart and wedge it into my little car along with everything else.
So now I'm traveling to Pratt, KS and the last time I did the painting full speed, with my extra half-tone color, with the new easel, in heels,
I was not pleased with the result. (To the right is the second to last time I did the painting before leaving for Pratt... looks
nothing like Theresa.) My talent night was Thursday, so I got to practice Thursday morning twice, but I was not remotely confident that I was going to be able to pull it off, especially after five days void of painting Theresa's face. Not to mention, I was afraid that I would have to put the easel in the unknowing (but capable) hands of one of the backstage guys to assemble. There were step by step instructions... and labeled bags with the nuts and bolts in them... but it was complicated and I knew I could do it quickly and correctly and it would just put me at ease knowing it was perfect. So I weaseled my way into putting it together in spare bits of time despite wishes of our chaperones that I just let someone else do it.
Then came Thursday - practice time. This was the first time I'd even worn my outfit. The music started. My brushes started whirring around the freshly stretched canvas. I was hitting my marks in the music. I had time to whip around and sing at the audience to add that little performance bit. And I had time. At the end, I had extra time! That never happened in practice! It had to have been adrenaline... was it luck or skill? I had one more time to run through it. And again, I had extra time at the end. Here is when I started wishing I had kept the yellow color in for her hair, but I had no way of knowing I would turn into a fast-forwarded version of myself once I hit the stage. But I was at peace.
And then it was time for competition. I did not have terrified anxiety, but rather a hushed buzz of anticipation. I was so ready to show the judges and the audience a new and fresh talent on the Miss Kansas stage.
I could not be more thrilled with the result. I did not win preliminary talent, but I know it was a crowd favorite and is something I will continue to compete with. My platform is called, "More Than What You See" and while it brings to light the conversation of the Beauty Myth that is present in our culture, more than that, I talk about the talents and characteristics that make people unique and successful. My painting was more than what you see because I fooled the viewers in starting upside-down. I am more than what you see because who would expect a pageant girl to make a massive portrait in 90 seconds?
This whole process is more than what you see because there was so much that went in to it for months and months before hand - mental preparation, sketches, paintings, building the easel, figuring out what sucked and what didn't. This is not just me, this is a culmination of many people who encouraged me and helped me brainstorm every detail down to the type of brush, the shade of paint, and the size of the earrings.
A huge thank you goes out to those who contributed to my success, sparked a flame under my butt to get me going, and encouraged this unique talent to grace the Miss Kansas stage in the hands of a firey ginger. Another gracious thank you goes to the viewers and audience members who accepted this as talent and reached out to me afterwards offering words of affirmation and are truly one of the reasons that I will continue to compete as a speed painter.
It took a hot second of bravery to have the guts to put this together and pull this off and not give up. The music that followed my brush strokes told me, "I wanna see you be brave." And brave, I was. I am proud of my performance and competition as Miss Butler County 2014. I am honored to represent Butler County as a Top Ten Finalist. And I will be back next year, better than ever.
- Annika Wooton
Miss Butler County 2014
